[vortico]

Germany and France are not necessarily the cause of something like CC0, because even if all countries honored public domain as an alternative to copyright law, it's a concept that lives in a different legal dimension. Declaring that a work is in the public domain doesn't remove copyright---it assigns a different legal code to your work. Using CC0 does remove copyright, through its fantastic double-fallback causes (2) and (3), so only one legal system needs to be assumed for CC0 to work: copyright (which conveniently most countries follow since the Berne Convention.)